The type of NAND is not revealed. We note that FlashArray//m systems use Samsung 3D V-NAND TLC (3bits/cell) flash and it wouldn’t be surprising if FlashBlade used it too.

Like Violin Memory VIMMS and EMC’s DSSD product, Pure is not using SSDs, having designed its own flash modules instead, and integrated them with compute and networking on a single carrier.

The blades run Elasticity software, which is distributed across the Xeon and ARM CPUs. FlashBlades are linked by Elastic Fabric Connectors and form a cluster. A FlashBlade enclosure can have up to 1.6PB of effective capacity*, assuming 3:1 data reduction, and 15GB/sec of bandwidth. There will be 120 CPU cores in total.

Frontal view of FlashBlade enclosure

A full rack could house 10 FlashBlade enclosures and offer 16PB of effective capacity and 150GB/sec bandwidth and 1,200 CPU cores. Pure has not indicated any FlashBlade cluster size limits.

Client system access is via Ethernet.

Elasticity software

This provides a common, scale-out object store accessed by file – NFS and CIFS*** – and object protocols, and with future protocol adaptability, meaning HDFS is coming. Maybe S3 and other access protocols as well.

Elasticity has a namespace and metadata addressing capability that can cope with “creating over 100 million unique objects/files every second for 20 years.” That would roughly be 100,000,000,628,992,000 objects; 100 quadrillion, give or take the odd billion or two.

System upgrades to support a larger address space are non-disruptive.

Management

Management is by the cloud-based Pure1 facility. There is a web-based GUI and a REST API. Pure says “anyone can manage FlashBlade – at any scale.”

FlashBlade GUI screenshot.

FlashBlade in the market

The use cases FlashBlade is designed for involve potentially massive unstructured data sets originating from the Internet of Things, log data and machine data as well as cloud-native web scale applications. We should think of large scale simulations, such as traditional weather forecasting and airflow analysis, security threat analysis, and Big Data analytics.

It will be more space-efficient than disk-based systems, Pure says, claiming it replaces “racks of storage with its 4U form-factor.”

Rear view of FlashBlade enclosure

A picture of the FlashBlade enclosure’s rear end shows four power sockets and two pairs of connectors with what look like two Ethernet ports.

It’s power needs are rated as 1,300watts/PB. And, Pure says, it is affordable because its cost is said to be less than $1 per GB of usable capacity.

Overview and availability

No other supplier has an all-flash, scale-out, file and object storage system, a combined NAS and object super-charger. **

A chip designer involved in an early access program said FlashBlade provided 50 per cent more throughput and shortened simulation time by more than 20 per cent compared to a hybrid flash/disk filer. An automotive company had a fourfold increase in simulation speed and was able to run three times as many concurrent simulations.

With this announcement, Pure has opened up a second all-flash array product line and extended its total addressable market into the scale-out file and object storage area, meaning large-scale simulation, genome processing, and general analytics. Think of areas such as oil and gas, life sciences, mechanical and electrical engineering, chip design, data-intensive entertainment and media processing, energy, financial services, utilities, and the like.

Depending upon the pricing and multi-tenancy features, FlashBlade could also be of interest to cloud service providers.